A Django app for downloading and parsing IRS campaign finance data, inspired by the New York Times Fech library.

Background

Some political committees report their contributions and expenditures to the IRS under § 527 of the U.S. tax code. The IRS publishes these disclosure forms as a bulk download. This app attempts to make sense of that archive.

The archive is updated every Sunday at 1:00 AM.

Getting started

Install it.

$ pip install django-irs-filings

Add irs to your list of INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py.

INSTALLED_APPS = (
    ...
    'irs',
    ...
)

Migrate your database.

$ python manage.py migrate irs

Finally, call the updateIRS command. This will download the latest zipped archive from the IRS website, unzip and parse it, and load it into the database.

$ python manage.py updateIRS